Some users of Apple's iMessage, iCloud lose service for several hours

A screen shot of the Apple website Thursday showing the status of various Apple services. The company's iCloud and iMessage were experiencing issues late Wednesday and early Thursday.

A screen shot of the Apple website Thursday showing the status of various Apple services. The company's iCloud and iMessage were experiencing issues late Wednesday and early Thursday. (Apple)

Paresh Dave

Parts of Apple’s iMessage instant-messaging platform and iCloud backup service were out of commission for almost 11 hours, but for only about 1% of users, according to Apple’s website.

The outage began at 9:30 p.m. PDT Wednesday and ended at 8:22 a.m. Thursday. It may have affected more than 3 million users, based on Apple's statement in June that its iCloud user base had grown to more than 300 million users.

Introduced two years ago, iCloud allows people who own Apple laptops, phones and tablets to sync data across multiple devices or simply store a copy of information online on computers controlled by Apple. Thursday’s issues appeared to affect document and photo storage along with attachments in iMessage.

Apple reported a separate issue that prevented 16.6% of users from making purchases from the iTunes Store for about 45 minutes Thursday morning. In the most recent quarter, Apple said it generated $4.3 billion from the store. That comes out to about $33,000 a minute, or $1.5 million in losses from the outage.

The company did not respond to a request for comment.

Here are some Twitter users who said they had problems with Apple services on Thursday: